The torches are coming – and there are THREE dead in Virginia – and Trump blames those who demonstrate against hate

Twittered out photo of the White Suprematist Torches converging on UVA

Daily Stormer gives Trumps 8/12/17 comments an A+

The premier White Suprematist Site loves Trumps comments.

Okay. Where is your candle light vigil. More to the point, I dealt with this stuff back in Michigan. I remember the pool around the corner that said “No Jews, dogs, or N——” . For a while, I thought that “things” were getting better and all that getting tear gassed, and work on racial and social justice back in the 60s had made a difference. Nope. Harder to do it all over again with two artificial hips, except virtually. I sure admire the legal observers in their green hats in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend.

Yes and no, Tom. The bully pulpit of the presidency is a huge amplifier and it seems it is Trump who has emboldened all these folks to come out of their caves and out from under rocks, and light up their torches with approbation. The Yes is that you and I need to make our courage and commitment to liberty and justice for all – and a “New birth of freedom” while realizing some of us will die for doing so – or wind up with concussions and broken bones at a minimum AND be blamed for our injuries.

These are the demons of darkness that are being summoned. I believe that THIS is what the word “evil” means.

I suggest that we need to stop #8212; right NOW — making excuses and rationalizations for the Collaborators who enable and encourage all this. Officials, voters, commentators — THIS is what Trumpism and Trumpists are all about.

If “judgement” (in a religious and spiritual sense) means anything at all, then I believe we need to loudly and courageously declare this to be WRONG.

The time for empathy, sympathy, and tolerance is AFTER those who embrace all this confess and beg for our forgiveness.

Until then, I believe each of needs to firmly, loudly and publicly reject this whenever we hear it.

This post is not the only “heads up, incoming” post I have out there calling out Nazi-ism. And making clear those who step in front of today’s brown shifts really are at physical risk. Back in the 60s I was clubbed and gassed for protesting too many times for me to remember how many. These folks will club, gas, shoot [using mercenaries and complicit “law enforcement”] as well as run you over and hunt you down. The time for litmus tests and factionalism is over, if there ever was a benefit to it. Those who want and choose liberty have to stand together and avoid party purity contests and stupid factionalism. And even embrace “independents” unenrolled folks, non voters, and those like me sick of how parties work.

3 dead. Same death toll as the Marathon bombing. Where’s the manhunt to find out if this terrorist acted alone? Where’s the FBI, DHS, DOJ and military lockdown? Is this suspect also losing his Miranda rights under the Patriot Act or is he being treated with kid gloves like Dylan Root was? Where’s the media asking for the “good” white Christian men to condemn the “bad” ones? I’m happy to issue a statement loud and clear that Jesus condemns all violence and loves all people, but it’s only fair if they ask me too. Where’s the outrage against pastors who aren’t condemning this violence from the pulpit? When will the religious leaders who cheered these forces on be forced to issue a statement saying “these nationalists don’t speak for us”? This double standard is all the proof you need that white supremacy is a multilayered problem that doesn’t start or end with Donald Trump. Even if he’s appallingly the first president since Woodrow Wilson unwilling to condemn the Klan. Time to tear the statues down, raise all Americans up, and condemn the twin ideologies of Confederacy and Nazism to the dustbin of history once and for all.

I understand your point in part but I downrated what sounds like hyperventilating. I’m pretty sure they quickly took the driver into custody whereas a manhunt was required for the marathon bombers. Also, didn’t Dylan Root get the death penalty, which hardly sounds like kid gloves? There are always going to be different people, different circumstances, different jurisdictions, and jumping right to it’s not perfectly fair I don’t think is helpful. Of course, the historian in me has to downrate suggestions of equivalency between the Confederacy and Nazism too.

Come now Christopher. Maybe you should ask the Nazis who marched there to protect Robert E Lees statue why they were waving Confederate flags alongside Nazi ones when chanting white lives matter/overthrow the Jews? Your historiography is a good two decades behind the times, if not more. The linkage is there. They were flying the flags side by side and any Jew or Black American knew what they meant by that.

Even Ken Burns masterful but now dated documentary acknowledged Lees’ brutality toward his own slaves and the clear linkage between secession and maintaining the peculiar institution of slavery. The Confederacy killed more Americans than the Nazis ever did, and American slavery killed far more people than the total number of people the Nazi’s gassed. I would be remiss to remind you that the 1910 VA statutes on race mixing were the very model for the first round of Nuremberg laws. Or that they made plans to colonize Eastern Europe modeled after the South’s plantation system. Or that many prominent American white supremacists like Henry Ford egged on the Nazis while whitewashing the Confederacy. Or that the KKK was hanging Jews and Catholics alongside blacks and flying Confederate flags when they did so-well before the Nazis showed up. I could go on but it’s really bothersome you refuse to see what’s plain with your own eyes. It’s obvious you have few African American friends, if any, since to a person all of mine along with my brown wife view that flag as one in the same with the Nazi flag. As does your hero Hillary Clinton for what it’s worth.

As for Root, Freddie Gray was intentionally bumped in the police car as a lot of black suspects are in a practice the President gleefully wants to make worse. In contrast, Root was given a bullet proof vest to protect him from vigilantes and taken to a Burger King to have it his way right after he turned himself in. They shot first and asked questions later for Tsarnaev as they always do for black suspects as well. Didn’t happen to Root. He also wasn’t tried under the federal death penalty for terrorism but merely the state penalty for murder in the first degree. If conservatives like Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham could make the connection, however reluctantly, between their states shameful display of that flag and his violence, why can’t you?

There is no doubt neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis share racist ideologies, but in their respective original iterations (1860s vs 1930s/40s) Nazis and the Holocaust are leaps and bounds worse than Confederates and slavery. It’s not just numbers, but intensity, and if I had to choose between living as a black person in the antebellum South or a Jew in the Third Reich I would choose the former without hesitation. I’d also need to see your numbers on slavery directly killing people. The “peculiar institution” was a lot of things, but not a systematic death machine like the Holocaust. After all, dead slaves can’t work the plantations nor fetch much on the auction block. Lee struggled with secession slavery and was even offered Union command so he’s not at the top of my list of Confederate villains, though there are plenty of those.

Please do not make this about me. You don’t know how many friends of any stripe I have (including, for that matter Jews if we’re making Holocaust comparisons). I am looking at this as a historian and trying very hard NOT to let emotion get in the way, though that is admittedly difficult with the Holocaust. I also want to say that my rating and response were difficult. I read the comment a couple of times before deciding to downrate because that’s a blunt instrument with only two choices (It would have been a 4 on the Soapblox platform.) and it took a couple of more reads before I decided that you deserved for me to at least try to put the ways it rubbed me the wrong way into words. We have not met (a situation I hope to one day remedy), but this is definitely a discussion it would be easier to have face to face when you could detect through facial and vocal expression that I’m struggling to communicate this more than words on a screen let on. The historian in me wants public displays of history with appropriate interpretation to remain, so while I’m not champing at the bit to remove all reminders the CSA existed I also can’t and won’t join the protests which are either led or hijacked by the hateful monsters who have no business even existing in 21st century America.

It’s not just numbers, but intensity, and if I had to choose between living as a black person in the antebellum South or a Jew in the Third Reich I would choose the former without hesitation.

As white Christian males this is never a choice we would have ever had to make, so it’s a hypothetical we can’t really weigh in on. I will say that the survivor narratives of slavery and the Holocaust are shockingly similar in describing individual adversity running up against a system designed to destroy bodies and souls.

Conservative estimates of the slave trade deaths alone range between 9 and 10 million casualties. This doesn’t include the quarter or so who perished on the death marches from the interior to slavery ports. It doesn’t include the number of slaves killed by their owners, something that was not a crime through the history of American slavery. Nor the number killed in slave revolts Not to mention the millions of women raped by their masters and force to see their kids with them stuck in the same situation.

It’s an apples to oranges comparison in terms of what happened. I would simply argue they are both heinously evil, and just as much as Germans no longer are allowed to fly the Nazi flag their grandfathers fought under, no American should fly the Confederate flag their far more distant ancestors fought under. We won’t move on from this history until we acknowledge it’s real victims and right the wrong.

I agree it’s apples and oranges; that’s part of what I am trying to say, but to be clear I am not trying to say that slavery was not a genocide. While I was not sure of exact numbers, the sense of less deliberation and methodicality spread out over longer time is why to me the numbers alone don’t tell the whole story in terms of comparison. There’s also the issue of general acceptance relative to the time. Part of what makes the Holocaust so abhorrent is how recent it was and that it was a new policy so aggressive that its intent was to be the “Final Solution” to the matter of Jews residing in Europe. Slavery OTOH was a fact of life practiced even by many we rightly honor by those who played a key role in founding our country. Of course if we are only judging by modern standards and our only choices are to name something right or wrong, then both are wrong. I understand Germany’s motive for banning the Nazi flag, but would oppose similar bans here on first amendment grounds. Each community needs to decide based on the context of such things like local relevance and the circumstances surrounding erecting the monument and consider options such as relocation or reinterpretation as well. Meanwhile I will continue to insist that there have been many genocides in human history, but only one Holocaust.

” My heart is in Charlottesville today, and with everyone made to feel unsafe in their country. Every minute we allow this to persist through tacit encouragement or inaction is a disgrace, and corrosive to our values.

Now is the time for leaders to be strong in their words and deliberate in their actions. We will not step backwards. If this is not who we are as Americans, let’s prove it.” Hillary Clinton

Gavin McInnes: Refers to himself as ““neo-masculine reactionary” and founder of super-sexist Proud Boys, which he refers to as a “pro-West fraternal organization.”

Shiva Ayyadurai: claims to have invented email–had some sort of relationship with Fran Drescher–PhD from MIT-endorsed for MA senate by Curt Shilling–says Elizabeth Warren is at the top of a “neo-caste system” of “academics, career politicians and lawyer/lobbyists”

Kyle “Based Stick Man” Chapman: founder of the Fraternal Order of the Alt Knights-Chapman made his bones hitting a counter protester over the head with a stick at Berkley

Joe Biggs–former soldier, fought in Iraq and Afghanistan–“reporter” for InfoWars until he had a falling out and started RogueRight website–said the San Bernadino shootings were a false flag operation

Brandon Navom–founder and president of the Software Engineers for Liberty group which is dedicated to developing and providing critical technological infrastructure programs and applications for Liberty candidates nation wide–lost a bid for Lowell City Council

Not all of the people are racists or nationalists, at least not exactly. It’s hard not to fall back on the terms for alleged communists back in the Red Scare days: sympathizer, fellow traveler, dupe. These people are aiding and/or abetting fascists and racists.

Two days ago in the NYT:“White Nationalists March on University of Virginia.” that said in part: “Late Friday night, several hundred torch-bearing men and women marched on the main quadrangle of the University of Virginia’s grounds, shouting, “You will not replace us,” and “Jew will not replace us.” They walked around the Rotunda, the university’s signature building, and to a statue of Thomas Jefferson, where a group of counterprotesters were gathered, and a brawl ensued. At least one person was led away in handcuffs by the police.”
Emancipation Park is just a mile from campus, near student housing.

The latter. The torch rally on Friday night was unauthorized and specifically targeted the interracial/interfaith prayer vigil happening at the campus chapel to prepare the student body and community for their authorized rally the next day. They marched right up to the church shouting horrible things, and other church services the next night were cancelled. This wasn’t speech-this was a mob ready to shed blood.

The latest is that Anonymous took down Daily Stormer. Crazy times. If “freedom of speech” does not include shouting “fire” in a theater and causing a stampede in that theater, does it include inciting or deliberately trying to incite riots and civil disorder?

He doubled down on “both sides” today. Let’s just say I have never before hearing this news on my car radio blurted out, “Our President is a flippin jerk!” regardless of my political opinion of the incumbent.

I think it’s crucial that we pay attention to how YOUNG our right-wing extremists are.

The apparent perpetrator of Monday’s vandalism of the Holocaust memorial is 17 years old — he can’t be identified because of his age. Just last June, James Isaac allegedly vandalized the same memorial. Mr. Isaac is 21.

Dylann Roof was born in 1994 — he is 23.

The right-wing shooters and extremists that I see are young, not old.

Whatever Donald Trump yearns for, these young people are pursuing a dangerously false vision — a false vision explicitly created by Donald Trump, the right wing, and nearly forty years of GOP racist and sexist pandering. A dangerously false vision injected each and every day by Fox News into the world-view of the majority of Americans who mistakenly rely on Fox for their information.

Yes, we need peace and pacifism. I suggest that we also need absolutely firm standards. We need to insist that our government officials not only condemn this toxic behavior, but ACT on that condemnation.